MBA1846 Why We’re Running A Virtual Team Retreat

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Hey O welcome to the the $100 MBA show. Powerful business lessons, ideas and strategies delivered to you every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zed home. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's episode you will learn why. We're running a virtual team retreat. For those who don't know, me and my business partner Nicole run a totally remote team. Our team is not that large, a little under 30 people, but they're all over the world. In 2019, we ran our first team retreat in Bali and it was one of the best things we could do for our team and just for the company. We built bonds, we built connections, we learned about each other, we worked better with each other afterwards. We were so psyched to have our next team retreat in 2020 in Thailand. But of course 2020 did not go as planned. Good old COVID 19 canceled that. But now that we're in 2021, we still can't travel. Covid's still a thing, but we thought, hey, we don't know when we'll have our next team retreat. Why wait? Let's run one virtually. Why? Well this is what today's episode's all about. I want to share with you why we decided to do this, what we're trying to get out of this. What's the return on investment for you to pull off a virtual retreat? What does that even look like that's. And how to pull it off? I might change your mind about a few things and why you should do the same. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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I want to start today's lesson with a little story. Back in 2011, when I was a educator, I was a full time chair department at a university. I was building businesses on the side. At this point, I did not transition into full time entrepreneurship. But one of the things that pushed me over the edge, I kind of said, hey, I want to do this full time, I want to build a business and I want to leave my long career in education. One of the big reasons was I just wanted to enjoy the people I work with every single day. I wanted to be able to hang out with smart people, people that make me smarter. I wanted to genuinely have fun at work. If I'm being completely honest, most of the people I worked with were just people. I didn't enjoy their company. There are many people that I did enjoy, but let's just say over 50% of the people I had to work with every day, it just wasn't pleasant. And it's for good reason. I didn't choose to work with them, the organization did. And this is one of the best things about being an entrepreneur is that you get to craft the perfect team. You get to craft the relationships you have with everybody you work with. You can make sure when you make a hire, it's a great culture fit for everybody else who's already on the team. And you could build a culture so strong that actually people self select. We have people that have left our company because they're like, you know what, you guys are a tight team. You guys are go getters. This culture's strong. I don't think I fit in here. And that's a valid reason to leave. Hey, that's not. We're just not their people and that's okay. Now building a strong culture in your business is huge because this will allow you to motivate your Team members, even when you're not washing, those people will go to work every day, working hard for your business. That doesn't happen by accident. That happens by design. You have to actually build that culture. You have to instill that culture. And it takes a lot of time, a lot of work. One of the things that speeds up that process, that reinforces it, makes it super strong. It's kind of like a booster shot is a team retreat. Because you're spending a condensed amount of time with people doing a lot of activities, stepping out of your normal work routine, doing things for fun, doing things to get to know each other. You build bonds, you build connections, and that culture becomes even stronger and stronger. And it happens very quickly. This is what I love about team retreats. Now, this is incredibly powerful in person. But it doesn't mean just because you can't do it in person, you shouldn't do it at all. And this is the conclusion we came up with. We want to run a virtual treat because we know a virtual retreat is better than no retreat. It's not the same. We know we're not in some exotic location, you know, sipping cocktails in front of a beautiful pool, you know, doing fun activities in person. Whether that's ATVing or bike riding in a rice paddy. Whatever it is, all that stuff sounds amazingly fun. And doing it over a video call is just not the same. I get it. But even if I get 50% of the results I get from a in person retreat, that 50% of the result is better than 0%. This is what really drove Nicole and I to say, let's do a virtual treat. Now, what does that even look like? So you can't just treat your virtual treats like a real life in person retreat. Cause it's just not the same. So what we're doing is we're actually just running a retreat week, and we're not doing the retreat the whole week. We're actually gonna carve out a couple sessions every day, three days a week, it's gonna be retreat week. And we're gonna take time off our busy schedule. Everybody in the company for a few days that week to do this retreat, to do these retreat activities, which are fun, which are team building, which will also be informative, where we'll talk about the future of the company and what's coming down the line, but also have a lot of fun doing team building activities, having dinners, having parties, getting to know each other. And because we're a growing team, there are new team members that join all the time and we need to get to know them. We get some old hands on our team, and they're great, but they need to get to know the new people as well. So one of the things that we started to do when we were planning this virtual retreat was Nicole and I and Romina, our executive assistant, we're starting to plan activities, plan a schedule. We felt this burden of, like, man, we don't know if this is good or exciting or if our team is going to like it. So we decided, why do we have to guess? Let's get them to participate. So we called out and said, hey, we want to form a retreat planning committee, just like the party planning committee on the show the Office, except this is funner, less bickering. And really, we're going to empower our own team members to build the retreat they want. We'll give a bit of guidance in terms of what are the goals of the retreat. But how they achieve those goals is going to be up to them. How often they meet, what they spend the budget on, all that kind of stuff. And this relieves the founders of the company from thinking, oh, man, we're going to build something they don't like or offer something that they're not going to enjoy or, well, get the team to do it. And people enjoy and remember things that they worked on together. They actually value things more because they put some effort into it. This is why it's so hard for us to get rid of our IKEA furniture. We took some time to put it together. This is actually a real thing. It's called the IKEA effect. So I encourage you to incorporate your team in planning this retreat. And who knows, if this goes well for our team, we might get the retreat planning committee to help plan, you know, a physical retreat one day. But the point here is this is their thing, so let them plan it. What I do recommend, though, is trying to make it at least a 5050 split, meaning the 50% of the time during the virtual team retreat should be fun, should be team building games, should be just partying and drinks and, you know, even it's over video calls, having lunches together, having social hour, you know, maybe do a little show and tell and people can share what's going on in their house, their families, maybe their last vacation picks. The other half could be also fun and exciting, but in an informative way. What's coming down the line for the business? What are some of the ideas you guys want to see? Maybe you can have a session where they come up with the next ideas for your business, the next offers, the next products. The sky's the limit. But the point here is that you got to make time for this. You got to schedule this or it's never going to happen.

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To wrap up today's lesson, we are so happy that we are having a virtual team retreat because we understand that you can't control what's happening in the world, what's going on around you. We don't know when we're going to travel next. So let's work with what we have. Let's make the best of what we have. And what we have is actually a lot. You can make a real fun, cool retreat for your whole team to remember and enjoy, even if it's virtual. Just think about all the things that you would do in retreat, like take pictures or have a video montage. You still can do that with a video retreat at the end and show a great montage of all the wonderful activities he did. A lot can be done, even when it's virtual. Thanks so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you never miss an episode. We're on every single podcast app. So wherever you love listening to podcasts, hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Your team is one of your biggest assets in business. These are the people that are going to build your company, that are going to build the best products possible, that are going to help you compete with the competition. They're going to help serve customers, invest in them, and this is an investment. It's not a waste of time. It's not, you know, a week of partying. It's a week to say, hey, you are important to me. Let's spend some time together. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Foreign.

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